Soldier for the Truth
By Marc Cooper
L.A. Weekly

Friday 20 February 2004

EXPOSING BUSH’S TALKING-POINTS WAR

After two decades in the U.S. Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, now 43, knew her career as a regional analyst was coming to an end when, in the months leading up to the war in Iraq, she felt she was being “propagandized” by her own bosses.
With master’s degrees from Harvard in government and zoology and two books on Saharan Africa to her credit, she found herself transferred in the spring of 2002 to a post as a political/military desk officer at the Defense Department’s office for Near East South Asia (NESA), a policy arm of the Pentagon.

Kwiatkowski got there just as war fever was spreading, or being spread as she would later argue, through the halls of Washington. Indeed, shortly after her arrival, a piece of NESA was broken off, expanded and re-dubbed with the Orwellian name of the Office of Special Plans. The OSP’s task was, ostensibly, to help the Pentagon develop policy around the Iraq crisis.

She would soon conclude that the OSP, a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld , was more akin to a nerve center for what she now calls a “neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon.”

Though a lifelong conservative, Kwiatkowski found herself appalled as the radical wing of the Bush administration, including her superiors in the Pentagon planning department, bulldozed internal dissent, overlooked its own intelligence and relentlessly pushed for confrontation with Iraq.

Deeply frustrated and alarmed, Kwiatkowski, still on active duty, took the unusual step of penning an anonymous column of internal Pentagon dissent that was posted on the Internet by former Colonel David Hackworth, America’s most decorated veteran.

As war inevitably approached, and as she neared her 20-year mark in the Air Force, Kwiatkowski concluded the only way she could viably resist what she now terms the “expansionist, imperialist” policies of the neoconservatives who dominated Iraq policy was by retiring and taking up a public fight against them.

She left the military last March, the same week that troops invaded Iraq. Kwiatkowski started putting her real name on her Web reports and began accepting speaking invitations. “I’m now a soldier for the truth,” she said in a speech last week at Cal Poly Pomona. Afterward, I spoke with her.

L.A. WEEKLY: What was the relationship between NESA and the now-notorious Office of Special Plans, the group set up by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney? Was the OSP, in reality, an intelligence operation to act as counter to the CIA?

KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: The NESA office includes the Iraq desk, as well as the desks of the rest of the region. It is under Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Bill Luti. When I joined them, in May 2002, the Iraq desk was there. We shared the same space, and we were all part of the same general group. At that time it was expanding. Contractors and employees were coming though it wasn’t clear what they were doing.

In August of 2002, the expanded Iraq desk found new spaces and moved into them. It was told to us that this was now to be known as the Office of Special Plans. The Office of Special Plans would take issue with those who say they were doing intelligence. They would say they were developing policy for the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the invasion of Iraq.

But developing policy is not the same as developing propaganda and pushing a particular agenda. And actually, that’s more what they really did. They pushed an agenda on Iraq, and they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon , to try and make this case of immediacy. This case of severe threat to the United States.

You retired when the war broke out and have been speaking out publicly. But you were already publishing critical reports anonymously while still in uniform and while still on active service. Why did you take that rather unusual step?

Due to my frustration over what I was seeing around me as soon as I joined Bill Luti’s organization, what I was seeing in terms of neoconservative agendas and the way they were being pursued to formulate a foreign policy and a military policy, an invasion of a sovereign country, an occupation, a poorly planned occupation. I was concerned about it; I was in opposition to that, and I was not alone.

So I started writing what I considered to be funny, short essays for my own sanity. Eventually, I e-mailed them to former Colonel David Hackworth, who runs the Web page Soldiers for the Truth, and he published them under the title “Insider Notes From the Pentagon.” I wrote 28 of those columns from August 2002 until I retired.

There you were, a career military officer, a Pentagon analyst, a conservative who had given two decades to this work. What provoked you to become first a covert and later a public dissident?

Like most people, I’ve always thought there should be honesty in government. Working 20 years in the military, I’m sure I saw some things that were less than honest or accountable. But nothing to the degree that I saw when I joined Near East South Asia.

This was creatively produced propaganda spread not only through the Pentagon, but across a network of policymakers, the State Department, with John Bolton; the Vice President’s Office, the very close relationship the OSP had with that office. That is not normal, that is a bypassing of normal processes. Then there was the National Security Council, with certain people who had neoconservative views; Scooter Libby, the vice president,s chief of staff; a network of think tanks who advocated neoconservative views, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy with Frank Gaffney, the columnist Charles Krauthammer, was very reliable. So there was just not a process inside the Pentagon that should have developed good honest policy, but it was instead pushing a particular agenda; this group worked in a coordinated manner, across media and parts of the government, with their neoconservative compadres.

How did you experience this in your day-to-day work?

There was a sort of groupthink, an adopted storyline: We are going to invade Iraq and we are going to eliminate Saddam Hussein and we are going to have bases in Iraq. This was all a given even by the time I joined them, in May of 2002.

You heard this in staff meetings?

The discussions were ones of this sort of inevitability. The concerns were only that some policymakers still had to get onboard with this agenda. Not that this agenda was right or wrong, but that we needed to convince the remaining holdovers. Colin Powell, for example. There was a lot of frustration with Powell; they said a lot of bad things about him in the office. They got very angry with him when he convinced Bush to go back to the U.N. and forced a four-month delay in their invasion plans.

General Tony Zinni is another one. Zinni, the combatant commander of Central Command, Tommy Franks’ predecessor, a very well-qualified guy who knows the Middle East inside out, knows the military inside out, a Marine, a great guy. He spoke out publicly as President Bush’s Middle East envoy about some of the things he saw. Before he was removed by Bush, I heard Zinni called a traitor in a staff meeting. They were very anti-anybody who might provide information that affected their paradigm. They were the spin enforcers.

How did this atmosphere affect your work? To be direct, were you told by your superiors what you could say and not say? What could and could not be discussed? Or were opinions they didn’t like just ignored?

I can give you one clear example where we were told to follow the party line, where I was told directly. I worked North Africa, which included Libya. I remember in one case, I had to rewrite something a number of times before it went through. It was a background paper on Libya, and Libya has been working for years to try and regain the respect of the international community. I had intelligence that told me this, and I quoted from the intelligence, but they made me go back and change it and change it. They’d make me delete the quotes from intelligence so they could present their case on Libya in a way that said it was still a threat to its neighbors and that Libya was still a belligerent, antagonistic force. They edited my reports in that way. In fact, the last report I made, they said, “Just send me the file.” And I don’t know what the report ended up looking like, because I imagine more changes were made.

On Libya, really a small player, the facts did not fit their paradigm that we have all these enemies.

One person you’ve written about is Abe Shulsky. You describe him as a personable, affable fellow but one who played a key role in the official spin that led to war.

Abe was the director of the Office of Special Plans. He was in our shared offices when I joined, in May 2002. He comes from an academic background; he’s definitely a neoconservative. He is a student of Leo Strauss from the University of Chicago, so he has that Straussian academic perspective. He was the final proving authority on all the talking points that were generated from the Office of Special Plans and that were distributed throughout the Pentagon, certainly to staff officers. And it appears to me they were also distributed to the Vice President’s Office and to the presidential speechwriters. Much of the phraseology that was in our talking points consists of the same things I heard the president say.

So Shulsky was the sort of controller, the disciplinarian, the overseeing monitor of the propaganda flow. From where you sat, did you see him manipulate the information?

We had a whole staff to help him do that, and he was the approving authority. I can give you one example of how the talking points were altered. We were instructed by Bill Luti, on behalf of the Office of Special Plans, on behalf of Abe Shulsky, that we would not write anything about Iraq, WMD or terrorism in any papers that we prepared for our superiors except as instructed by the Office of Special Plans. And it would provide to us an electronic document of talking points on these issues. So I got to see how they evolved.

It was very clear to me that they did not evolve as a result of new intelligence, of improved intelligence, or any type of seeking of the truth. The way they evolved is that certain bullets were dropped or altered based on what was being reported on the front pages of the Washington Post or The New York Times.

Can you be specific?

One item that was dropped was in November [2002]. It was the issue of the meeting in Prague prior to 9/11 between Mohammed Atta and a member of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence force. We had had this in our talking points from September through mid-November. And then it dropped out totally. No explanation. Just gone. That was because the media reported that the FBI had stepped away from that, that the CIA said it didn’t happen.

Let’s clarify this. Talking points are generally used to deal with media. But you were a desk officer, not a politician who had to go and deal with the press. So are you saying the Office of Special Plans provided you a schematic, an outline of the way major points should be addressed in any report or analysis that you developed regarding Iraq, WMD or terrorism?

That’s right. And these did not follow the intent, the content or the accuracy of intelligence . . .

They were political . . .

They were political, politically manipulated. They did have obviously bits of intelligence in them, but they were created to propagandize. So we inside the Pentagon, staff officers and senior administration officials who might not work Iraq directly, were being propagandized by this same Office of Special Plans.

In the 10 months you worked in that office in the run-up to the war, was there ever any open debate? The public, at least, was being told at the time that there was a serious assessment going on regarding the level of threat from Iraq, the presence or absence of WMD, et cetera. Was this debated inside your office at the Pentagon?

No. Those things were not debated. To them, Saddam Hussein needed to go.

You believe that decision was made by the time you got there, almost a year before the war?

That decision was made by the time I got there. So there was no debate over WMD, the possible relations Saddam Hussein may have had with terrorist groups and so on. They spent their energy gathering pieces of information and creating a propaganda storyline, which is the same storyline we heard the president and Vice President Cheney tell the American people in the fall of 2002.

The very phrases they used are coming back to haunt them because they are blatantly false and not based on any intelligence. The OSP and the Vice President’s Office were critical in this propaganda effort, to convince Americans that there was some just requirement for pre-emptive war.

What do you believe the real reasons were for the war?

The neoconservatives needed to do more than just topple Saddam Hussein. They wanted to put in a government friendly to the U.S., and they wanted permanent basing in Iraq. There are several reasons why they wanted to do that. None of those reasons, of course, were presented to the American people or to Congress.

So you don’t think there was a genuine interest as to whether or not there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

It’s not about interest. We knew. We knew from many years of both high-level surveillance and other types of shared intelligence, not to mention the information from the U.N., we knew, we knew what was left [from the Gulf War] and the viability of any of that. Bush said he didn’t know.

The truth is, we know [Saddam] didn’t have these things. Almost a billion dollars has been spent - a billion dollars!, by David Kay’s group to search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn’t find anything, they didn’t expect to find anything.

So if, as you argue, they knew there weren’t any of these WMD, then what exactly drove the neoconservatives to war?

The neoconservatives pride themselves on having a global vision, a long-term strategic perspective. And there were three reasons why they felt the U.S. needed to topple Saddam, put in a friendly government and occupy Iraq.

One of those reasons is that sanctions and containment were working and everybody pretty much knew it. Many companies around the world were preparing to do business with Iraq in anticipation of a lifting of sanctions. But the U.S. and the U.K. had been bombing northern and southern Iraq since 1991. So it was very unlikely that we would be in any kind of position to gain significant contracts in any post-sanctions Iraq. And those sanctions were going to be lifted soon, Saddam would still be in place, and we would get no financial benefit.

The second reason has to do with our military-basing posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the restrictions on our basing. And also there was dissatisfaction from the people of Saudi Arabia. So we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been searching for since the days of Carter, to secure the energy lines of communication in the region. Bases in Iraq, then, were very important, that is, if you hold that is America’s role in the world. Saddam Hussein was not about to invite us in.

The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made in the Food for Oil program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long before 9/11, in November 2000, selling his oil for euros. The oil sales permitted in that program aren’t very much. But when the sanctions would be lifted, the sales from the country with the second largest oil reserves on the planet would have been moving to the euro.

The U.S. dollar is in a sensitive period because we are a debtor nation now. Our currency is still popular, but it’s not backed up like it used to be. If oil, a very solid commodity, is traded on the euro, that could cause massive, almost glacial, shifts in confidence in trading on the dollar. So one of the first executive orders that Bush signed in May [2003] switched trading on Iraq’s oil back to the dollar.

At the time you left the military, a year ago, just how great was the influence of this neoconservative faction on Pentagon policy?

When it comes to Middle East policy, they were in complete control, at least in the Pentagon. There was some debate at the State Department.

Indeed, when you were still in uniform and writing a Web column anonymously, you expressed your bitter disappointment when Secretary of State Powell, in your words, eventually “capitulated.”

He did. When he made his now-famous power-point slide presentation at the U.N., he totally capitulated. It meant he was totally onboard. Whether he believed it or not.

You gave your life to the military, you voted Republican for many years, you say you served in the Pentagon right up to the outbreak of war. What does it feel like to be out now, publicly denouncing your old bosses?

Know what it feels like? It feels like duty. That’s what it feels like. I’ve thought about it many times. You know, I spent 20 years working for something that, at least under this administration, turned out to be something I wasn’t working for. I mean, these people have total disrespect for the Constitution. We swear an oath, military officers and NCOs alike swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. These people have no respect for the Constitution. The Congress was misled, it was lied to. At a very minimum that is a subversion of the Constitution. A pre-emptive war based on what we knew was not a pressing need is not what this country stands for.

What I feel now is that I’m not retired. I still have a responsibility to do my part as a citizen to try and correct the problem.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Why he’s right about Bush’s negligence on terrorism
By Fred Kaplan
Slate.com

March 23, 2004

Clarke: A Credible Critic

I have no doubt that Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council official who has launched a broadside against President Bush’s counterterrorism policies, is telling the truth about every single charge. There are three reasons for this confidence.
First, his basic accusations are consistent with tales told by other officials, including some who had no significant dealings with Clarke.

Second, the White House’s attempts at rebuttal have been extremely weak and contradictory. If Clarke were wrong, one would expect the comebacks,especially from Bush’s aides, who excel at the counterstrike,to be stronger and more substantive.

Third, I went to graduate school with Clarke in the late 1970s, at MIT’s political science department, and called him as an occasional source in the mid-’80s when he was in the State Department and I was a newspaper reporter. There were good things and dubious things about Clarke, traits that inspired both admiration and leeriness. The former: He was very smart, a highly skilled (and utterly nonpartisan) analyst, and he knew how to get things done in a calcified bureaucracy. The latter: He was arrogant, made no effort to disguise his contempt for those who disagreed with him, and blatantly maneuvered around all obstacles to make sure his views got through.

The key thing, though, is this: Both sets of traits tell me he’s too shrewd to write or say anything in public that might be decisively refuted. As Daniel Benjamin, another terrorism specialist who worked alongside Clarke in the Clinton White House, put it in a phone conversation today, “Dick did not survive and flourish in the bureaucracy all those years by leaving himself open to attack.”

Clarke did suffer one setback in his 30-year career in high office, though he doesn’t mention it in his book. James Baker, the first President Bush’s secretary of state, fired Clarke from his position as director of the department’s politico-military bureau. (Bush’s NSC director, Brent Scowcroft, hired him almost instantly.) I doubt we’ll be hearing from Baker on this episode: He fired Clarke for being too close to Israel,not a point the Bush family’s political savior is likely to make in an election season.

But on to the substance. Clarke’s main argument,made in his new book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, in lengthy interviews on CBS’s 60 Minutes and PBS’s Charlie Rose Show, and presumably in his testimony scheduled for tomorrow before the 9/11 Commission,is that Bush has done (as Clarke put it on CBS) “a terrible job” at fighting terrorism. Specifically: In the summer of 2001, Bush did almost nothing to deal with mounting evidence of an impending al-Qaida attack. Then, after 9/11, his main response was to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. This move not only distracted us from the real war on terrorism, it fed into Osama Bin Laden’s propaganda,that the United States would invade and occupy an oil-rich Arab country,and thus served as the rallying cry for new terrorist recruits.

Clarke’s charges have raised a furor because of who he is. In every administration starting with Ronald Reagan’s, Clarke was a high-ranking official in the State Department or the NSC, dealing mainly with countering weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Under Clinton and the first year of George W. Bush, he worked in the White House as the national coordinator for terrorism, a Cabinet-level post created specifically for his talents. When the terrorists struck on Sept. 11, Condi Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, designated Clarke as the “crisis manager;” he ran the interagency meetings from the Situation Room, coordinating,in some cases, directing,the response.

Clarke backs up his chronicle with meticulous detail, but the basic charges themselves should not be so controversial; certainly, they’re nothing new. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill wrote in his book, The Price of Loyalty, that Bush’s top officials talked about invading Iraq from the very start of the administration. Jim Mann’s new book about Bush’s war Cabinet, Rise of the Vulcans, reveals the historic depths of this obsession.

Most pertinent, Rand Beers, the official who succeeded Clarke after he left the White House in February 2003, resigned in protest just one month later,five days before the Iraqi war started,for precisely the same reason that Clarke quit. In June, he told the Washington Post, “The administration wasn’t matching its deeds to its words in the war on terror. They’re making us less secure, not more.” And: “The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged, and generally underfunded.” (There is more about Beers, including his association with Clarke and whether there’s anything pertinent about his current position as a volunteer national security adviser to John Kerry’s presidential campaign).

Clarke’s distinction, of course, is that he was the ultimate insider,as highly and deeply inside, on this issue, as anyone could imagine. And so his charges are more credible, potent, and dangerous. So, how has Team Bush gone after Clarke? Badly.

To an unusual degree, the Bush people can’t get their story straight. On the one hand, Condi Rice has said that Bush did almost everything that Clarke recommended he do. On the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh’s show, acted as if Clarke were a lowly, eccentric clerk: “He wasn’t in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff.” This is laughably absurd. Clarke wasn’t just in the loop, he was the loop.

Cheney’s elaboration of his dismissal is blatantly misleading. “He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things … attacks on computer systems and, you know, sophisticated information technology,” Cheney scoffed. Limbaugh replied, “Well, now, that explains a lot, that answer right there.”

It explains nothing. First, he wasn’t “moved out”; he transferred, at his own request, out of frustration with being cut out of the action on broad terrorism policy, to a new NSC office dealing with cyberterrorism. Second, he did so after 9/11. (He left government altogether in February 2003.)

In a further effort to minimize Clarke’s importance, a talking-points paper put out by the White House press office states that, contrary to his claims, “Dick Clarke never had Cabinet rank.” At the same time, the paper denies,again, contrary to the book,that he was demoted: He “continued to be the National Coordinator on Counter-terrorism.”

Both arguments are deceptive. Clarke wasn’t a Cabinet secretary, but as Clinton’s NCC, he ran the “Principals Committee” meetings on counterterrorism, which were attended by Cabinet secretaries. Two NSC senior directors reported to Clarke directly, and he had reviewing power over relevant sections of the federal budget.

Clarke writes (and nobody has disputed) that when Condi Rice took over the NSC, she kept him onboard and preserved his title but demoted the position. He would no longer participate in, much less run, Principals’ meetings. He would report to deputy secretaries. He would have no staff and would attend no more meetings with budget officials.

Clarke probably resented the slight, took it personally. But he also saw it as a downgrading of the issue, a sign that al-Qaida was no longer taken as the urgent threat that the Clinton White House had come to interpret it. (One less-noted aspect of Clarke’s book is its detailed description of the major steps that Clinton took to combat terrorism.)

The White House talking-points paper is filled with these sorts of distortions. For instance, it notes that Bush didn’t need to meet with Clarke because, unlike Clinton, he met every day with CIA Director George Tenet, who talked frequently about al-Qaida.

But here’s how Clarke describes those meetings:

[Tenet] and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration. … We agreed that Tenet would insure that the president’s daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda.

The problem is: Nothing happened. (It is significant, by the way, that Tenet has not been recruited,not successfully, anyway,to rebut Clarke’s charges. Clarke told Charlie Rose that he was “very close” to Tenet. The two come off as frustrated allies in Clarke’s book.)

The White House document insists Bush did take the threat seriously, telling Rice at one point “that he was ‘tired of swatting flies’ and wanted to go on the offense against al-Qaeda.”

Here’s how Clarke describes that exchange:

President Bush, reading the intelligence every day and noticing that there was a lot about al Qaeda, asked Condi Rice why it was that we couldn’t stop “swatting flies” and eliminate al Qaeda. Rice told me about the conversation and asked how the plan to get al Qaeda was coming in the Deputies’ Committee. “It can be presented to the Principals in two days, whenever we can get a meeting,” I pressed. Rice promised to get to it soon. Time passed.

The Principals meeting, which Clarke urgently requested during Bush’s first week in office, did not take place until one week before 9/11. In his 60 Minutes interview, Clarke spelled out the significance of this delay. He contrasted July 2001 with December 1999, when the Clinton White House got word of an impending al-Qaida attack on Los Angeles International Airport and Principals meetings were called instantly and repeatedly:

In December ‘99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the Attorney General might have found out that there were al Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI, at lower levels, knew [but] never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI. … We could have caught those guys and then we might have been able to pull that thread and get more of the conspiracy. I’m not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance.

That’s what Clarke says is the tragedy of Bush’s inaction, and nobody in the White House has dealt with the charge at all.

Fred Kaplan writes the “War Stories” column for Slate.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Administration Distorted Intelligence Reports
By James Klurfeld
Newsday.com

February 5, 2004

If you listen only to weapons inspector David Kay, you would have the impression that the Bush administration was nothing but an innocent victim of poor intelligence information.
The intelligence agencies told the policy makers the Iraqis had all those weapons of mass destruction, and the administration did what it had to do and invaded Iraq. Simple as that.

Not so fast. There are two distinctly different aspects to the story here. One is Kay’s tale of misjudgments and mistakes by the intelligence community. You can’t blame that on the Bush administration. And that’s what is going to be the subject of a more thorough investigation. Fine.

But the other story is how the Bush administration handled the intelligence information it was given. There’s always an interaction between the producers of intelligence and the consumers, and it’s a crucial relationship. This is the area in which I believe the Bush administration is vulnerable. It took a difficult circumstance - very uncertain intelligence information - and made it much worse by selectively using the information it was given, pressuring intelligence officials to give it only what it wanted to hear, using raw, unvetted intelligence data, and exaggerating and distorting the uncertain information it did have. This is bad stuff.

Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA Persian Gulf expert and then National Security Council member in the Clinton administration, says in an Atlantic Monthly article that he received numerous complaints from friends in the intelligence community about the manner in which the Bush administration handled intelligence information.

Pollack writes, “Administration officials reacted strongly, negatively and aggressively when presented with information or analysis that contradicted what they already believed about Iraq…. Many (officials) believe the CIA analysts tended to be left-leaning cultural relativists who consistently downplayed threats to the United States. They believed the agency, not the administration, was biased, and they were acting simply to correct that bias.”

The Pentagon actually created a separate office to deal with Iraq intelligence issues, the Office of Special Plans. Pollack says that OSP “cherry-picked” the intelligence it passed on, selecting reports that supported the administration’s pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest. It also passed on raw intelligence to senior administration officials without having it properly vetted by intelligence analysts - a cardinal sin in the intelligence world. And the OSP gave great credence to reports of WMD from members of the Iraqi National Congress, the Iraqi exile group closely aligned with Pentagon officials. The intelligence community was highly skeptical of much of that information, but was ignored.

The administration also used some of the unvetted intelligence in important speeches and pronouncements to the public. On Sept. 24, 2002, President George W. Bush, in his weekly radio address, warned Iraq “would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year.” The intelligence community warned that was an absolute worst-case scenario and unlikely to happen. But the administration discarded the caveats. Just check the transcript of Vice President Dick Cheney on “Meet the Press” Sept. 14, 2003, or Undersecretary of State John Bolton at an international conference on Nov. 1, 2002.

My conclusion isn’t that the administration was either duped or sloppy about the intelligence information. Instead, it did not care what the intelligence said or how ambiguous it might be. It was going to invade Iraq because it believed that was the right policy, damn the intelligence, damn what it has done to our credibility throughout the world.

Maybe, if the administration had been right about WMD, it would have gotten away with its distortions and exaggerations. But it was wrong, and it shouldn’t be let off the hook.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Bush Sabatoges WMD Commission Before It Starts
The Daily Mis-Lead
February 4, 2004

Over the last two days, President Bush and the White House have claimed that they are going to establish an “independent” commission to promptly investigate the over-hyping of intelligence before the Iraq war. But as details come out about the White House’s proposal, it appears the commission will be neither independent nor prompt.
Specifically, the president will appoint the entire commission himself, breaking the previous tradition of allowing lawmakers from both parties to appoint commission members. Although lawmakers have raised objections to the commission’s lack of independence, the White House is moving forward with its plans.

Additionally, despite the fact that the commission’s work will be critical to national security, the president will only authorize a commission that produces a report after the election — so as to minimize any political fallout for himself. This contrasts sharply to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is putting national security ahead of politics. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “in contrast to a bipartisan investigating committee announced by Bush, the British panel is to announce its conclusions by July. That would put any damaging disclosures for Blair’s government well in advance of parliamentary elections, expected in 2005.” It also contrasts with similar investigations in the United States. In 1983, after the terrorist attacks on U.S. troops in Beirut, a commission was appointed and finished its work within 3 months.

As one major newspaper editorial board summed up, “The president’s goal is to delay any objective findings about prewar intelligence until after the election, leaving him free to decide what the administration knew and didn’t know and who is to blame.” And the President’s continued misleading on WMD could come at a price. As Republican Senator Chuck Hagel said, a failure to convince the public that Bush did not “exaggerate” the case for war “would put the president in a very bad position. He said people would start asking, “Do we trust his word? Do we trust him to lead this country?”

Sources:
President Bush Discusses Budget After Cabinet Meeting, 2/2/2004
Democrats urge truly independent investigation, ABC News, 2004
Bush to appoint panel to investigate pre-Iraq intelligence, Kansas City Star, 2/2/2004
Blair, Following Bush, Agrees to Inquiry Into Iraq Intelligence, Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2004
DoD Commission on Beirut Attack, 12/20/83
Political war games, Palm Beach Post, 2/4/2004
Credibility of Bush Becomes a Problem, Mostly Self-Inflicted, Wall Street Journal, 2/4/2004

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

The Lie Factory
By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest
Mother Jones

January/February 2004 Issue

Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.
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It’s a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.

So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration’s prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon’s Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq’s weapons and ties to terrorists. “It wasn’t intelligence* — it was propaganda,” she says. “They’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together.” It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials* — including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell’s testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February* — that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.

Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews* — some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity* — exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department’s war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It’s the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.

Six months after the end of major combat in Iraq, the United States had spent $300 million trying to find banned weapons in Iraq, and President Bush was seeking $600 million more to extend the search. Not found were Iraq’s Scuds and other long-range missiles, thousands of barrels and tons of anthrax and botulism stock, sarin and VX nerve agents, mustard gas, biological and chemical munitions, mobile labs for producing biological weapons, and any and all evidence of a reconstituted nuclear-arms program, all of which had been repeatedly cited as justification for the war. Also missing was evidence of Iraqi collaboration with Al Qaeda.

The reports, virtually all false, of Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties emanated from an apparatus that began to gestate almost as soon as the Bush administration took power. In the very first meeting of the Bush national-security team, one day after President Bush took the oath of office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was raised, according to one of the participants in the meeting — and officials all the way down the line started to get the message, long before 9/11. Indeed, the Bush team at the Pentagon hadn’t even been formally installed before Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense, and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, began putting together what would become the vanguard for regime change in Iraq.

Both Wolfowitz and Feith have deep roots in the neoconservative movement. One of the most influential Washington neo- conservatives in the foreign-policy establishment during the Republicans’ wilderness years of the 1990s, Wolfowitz has long held that not taking Baghdad in 1991 was a grievous mistake. He and others now prominent in the administration said so repeatedly over the past decade in a slew of letters and policy papers from neoconservative groups like the Project for the New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that there was no difference between U.S. and Israeli security policy and that the best way to secure both countries’ future was to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem not by serving as a broker, but with the United States as a force for “regime change” in the region.

Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Though Feith would not be officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode set up shop in Feith’s office in early January. Rhode, seen by many veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department’s new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no “bartering in the bazaar anymore. You’re going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so.”

Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically, “Those who speak, pay.”

According to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren’t sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be “pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with,” says a former analyst. “They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the fuck out of there.”

The unofficial, off-site recruitment office for Feith and Rhode was the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank whose 12th-floor conference room in Washington is named for the dean of neoconservative defense strategists, the late Albert Wohlstetter, an influential RAND analyst and University of Chicago mathematician. Headquartered at AEI is Richard Perle, Wohlstetter’s prize protege, the godfather of the AEI-Defense Department nexus of neoconservatives who was chairman of the Pentagon’s influential Defense Policy Board. Rhode, along with Michael Rubin, a former AEI staffer who is also now at the Pentagon, was a ubiquitous presence at AEI conferences on Iraq over the past two years, and the two Pentagon officials seemed almost to be serving as stage managers for the AEI events, often sitting in the front row and speaking in stage whispers to panelists and AEI officials. Just after September 11, 2001, Feith and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.

Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith’s office, which would be the nucleus of the Defense Department’s Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington. While the CIA and other intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. “In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq,” he says. “We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact.” Indeed, that was the consensus among virtually all anti-terrorism specialists.

In short, Wurmser, backed by Feith and Rhode, set out to prove what didn’t exist.

In an Administration devoted to the notion of “Feith-based intelligence,” Wurmser was ideal. For years, he’d been a shrill ideologue, part of the minority crusade during the 1990s that was beating the drums for war against Iraq. Along with Perle and Feith, in 1996 Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav, wrote a provocative strategy paper for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” It called on Israel to work with Jordan and Turkey to “contain, destabilize and roll back” various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of the Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne, and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a “prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria’s territorial integrity.”

In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal called “Iraq Needs a Revolution” and the next year co-signed a letter with Perle calling for all-out U.S. support of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, in promoting an insurgency in Iraq. At AEI, Wurmser wrote Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, essentially a book-length version of “A Clean Break” that proposed an alliance between Jordan and the INC to redraw the map of the Middle East. Among the mentors cited by Wurmser in the book: Chalabi, Perle, and Feith.

The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a Pentagon “cell,” was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a controversial press briefing in October 2002, a year after Wurmser’s unit was established, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that a primary purpose of the unit was to cull factoids, which were then used to disparage, undermine, and contradict the CIA’s reporting, which was far more cautious and nuanced than Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith wanted. Rumsfeld particularly enjoyed harassing the CIA staffer who briefed him every morning, using the type of data produced by the intelligence unit. “What I could do is say, ‘Gee, what about this?’” Rumsfeld noted. “‘Or what about that? Has somebody thought of this?’” Last June, when Feith was questioned on the same topic at a briefing, he acknowledged that the secret unit in fact looked at the connection between Iraq and terrorism, saying, “You can’t rely on deterrence to deal with the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of state sponsors of terrorism because [of] the possibility that those state sponsors might employ chemical weapons or biological weapons by means of a terrorist organization proxy.

Though Feith, in that briefing, described Wurmser’s unit as an innocent project, “a global exercise” that was not meant to put pressure on other intelligence agencies or create skewed intelligence to fit preconceived policy notions, many other sources assert that it did exactly that. That the White House and the Pentagon put enormous pressure on the CIA to go along with its version of events has been widely reported, highlighted by visits to CIA headquarters by Vice President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff. Led by Perle, the neocons seethed with contempt for the CIA. The CIA’s analysis, said Perle, “isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.” Standing in a crowded hallway during an AEI event, Perle added, “The CIA is status quo oriented. They don’t want to take risks.”

That became the mantra of the shadow agency within an agency.

Putting Wurmser in charge of the unit meant that it was being run by a pro-Iraq-war ideologue who’d spent years calling for a pre-emptive invasion of Baghdad and who was clearly predisposed to find what he wanted to see. Adding another layer of dubious quality to the endeavor was the man partnered with Wurmser, F. Michael Maloof. Maloof, a former aide to Perle in the 1980s Pentagon, was twice stripped of his high-level security clearances* — once in late 2001 and, again, last spring, for various infractions. Maloof was also reportedly involved in a bizarre scheme to broker contacts between Iraqi officials and the Pentagon, channeled through Perle, in what one report called a “rogue [intelligence] operation” outside official CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency channels.

As the momentum for war began to build in early 2002, Wolfowitz and Feith beefed up the intelligence unit and created an Iraq war-planning unit in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia Affairs section, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, under the rubric “Office of Special Plans,” or OSP; the new unit’s director was Abram N. Shulsky. By then, Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neocon, who was in charge of the State Department’s disarmament, proliferation, and WMD office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky’s OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control, banishing veteran experts* — including Joseph McMillan, James Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt* — who, despite years of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other positions or retired. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee war plans but would act aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White House.

Both Luti and Shulsky were neoconservatives who were ideological soul mates of Wolfowitz and Feith. But Luti was more than that. He’d come to the Pentagon directly from the office of Vice President Cheney. That gave Luti, a recently retired, decorated Navy captain whose career ran from combat aviation to command of a helicopter assault ship, extra clout. Along with his colleague Colonel William Bruner, Luti had done a stint as an aide to Newt Gingrich in 1996 and, like Perle and Wolfowitz, was an acolyte of Wohlstetter’s. “He makes Ollie North look like a moderate,” says a NESA veteran.

Shulsky had been on the Washington scene since the mid-1970s. As a Senate intelligence committee staffer for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he began to work with early neoconservatives like Perle, who was then an aide to Senator Henry Jackson. Later, in the Reagan years, Shulsky followed Perle to the Pentagon as Perle’s arms-control adviser. In the ’90s, Shulsky co-authored a book on intelligence called Silent Warfare, with Gary Schmitt. Shulsky had served with Schmitt on Moynihan’s staff and they had remained friends. Asked about the Pentagon’s Iraq intelligence “cell,” Schmitt* — who is currently the executive director of the Project for the New American Century* — says that he can’t say much about it “because one of my best friends is running it.”

According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, Luti and Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. “It was organized like a machine,” she says. “The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission.” At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began “hot-desking,” or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with Feith and Luti, before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq’s WMD and its links to Al Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. “Of course, we never thought they’d go directly to the White House,” she adds.

Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, “I’ve got to get this over to ‘Scooter’ right away.” She later found out that “Scooter” was none other than Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.

“Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work directly on a project for the vice president,” she says. “It was a little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney’s office.”

Although Feith insists that the OSP did not seek to gather its own intelligence, Kwiatkowski and others sharply disagree. Staff working for Luti and Shulsky in NESA/OSP churned out propaganda-style intelligence, she says. As an example, she cited the work of a U.S. intelligence officer and Arabic specialist, Navy Lt. Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, who was a special assistant to Luti. “His job was to peruse the Arabic-language media to find articles that would incriminate Saddam Hussein about terrorism, and he translated these.” Such raw intelligence is usually subject to a thorough vetting process, tracked, verified, and checked by intelligence professionals. But not at OSP* — the material that it produced found its way directly into speeches by Bush, Cheney, and other officials.

According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence specialist at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters. “People were being pulled aside [and being told], ‘We saw your last piece and it’s not what we’re looking for,’” he says. “It was pretty blatant.” Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and Christian Westermann, have both charged that pressure was being put on them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in particular from Bolton’s office. “The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.,” Thielmann told the New York Times. “And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things.”

Besides Cheney, key members of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, including Perle and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, all Iraq hawks, had direct input into NESA/OSP. The offices of NESA were located on the Pentagon’s fourth floor, seventh corridor of D Ring, and the Policy Board’s offices were directly below, on the third floor. During the run-up to the Iraq war, Gingrich often came up for closed-door meetings with Luti, who in 1996 had served as a congressional fellow in Speaker of the House Gingrich’s office.

As OSP got rolling, Luti brought in Colonel Bruner, a former military aide to Gingrich, and, together, Luti and Bruner opened the door to a vast flow of bogus intelligence fed to the Pentagon by Iraqi defectors associated with Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress group of exiles. Chalabi founded the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, with the help of a shadowy CIA-connected public-relations firm called the Rendon Group, one of whose former employees, Francis Brooke, has been a top aide to Chalabi ever since. A scion of an aristocratic Iraqi family, Chalabi fled Baghdad at the age of 13, in 1958, when the corrupt Iraqi Hashemite monarchy was overthrown by a coalition of communists and the Iraqi military. In the late 1960s, Chalabi studied mathematics at the University of Chicago with Wohlstetter, who introduced him to Richard Perle more than a decade later. Long associated with the heart of the neoconservative movement, Chalabi founded Petra Bank in Jordan, which grew to be Jordan’s third-largest bank by the 1980s. But Chalabi was accused of bank fraud, embezzlement, and currency manipulation, and he barely escaped before Jordanian authorities could arrest him; in 1992, he was convicted and sentenced in absentia to more than 20 years of hard labor. After founding the INC, Chalabi’s bungling, unreliability, and penchant for mismanaging funds caused the CIA to sour on him, but he never lost the support of Perle, Feith, Gingrich, and their allies; once, soon after 9/11, Perle invited Chalabi to address the Defense Policy Board.

According to multiple sources, Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service, and sometimes through the INC’s own U.S.-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC’s intelligence “isn’t reliable at all,” according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism. “Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches.”

Bruner, the aide to Luti and Gingrich’s former staffer, “was Chalabi’s handler,” says Kwiatkowski. “He would arrange meetings with Chalabi and Chalabi’s folks,” she says, adding that the INC leader often brought people into the NESA/OSP offices for debriefings. Chalabi claims to have introduced only three actual defectors to the Pentagon, a figure Thielmann considers “awfully low.” However, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, the three defectors provided by Chalabi turned up exactly zero useful intelligence. The first, an Iraqi engineer, claimed to have specific information about biological weapons, but his information didn’t pan out; the second claimed to know about mobile labs, but that information, too, was worthless; and the third, who claimed to have data about Iraq’s nuclear program, proved to be a fraud. Chalabi also claimed to have given the Pentagon information about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda. “We gave the names of people who were doing the links,” he told an interviewer from PBS’s Frontline. Those links, of course, have not been discovered. Thielmann told the same Frontline interviewer that the Office of Special Plans didn’t apply strict intelligence-verification standards to “some of the information coming out of Chalabi and the INC that OSP and the Pentagon ran with.”

In the war’s aftermath, the Defense Intelligence Agency* — which is not beholden to the neoconservative civilians at the Pentagon* — leaked a report it prepared, concluding that few, if any, of the INC’s informants provided worthwhile intelligence.

So far, despite all of the investigations under way, there is little sign that any of them are going to delve into the operations of the Luti-Shulsky Office of Special Plans and its secret intelligence unit. Because it operates in the Pentagon’s policy shop, it is not officially part of the intelligence community, and so it is seemingly immune to congressional oversight.

With each passing day, it is becoming excruciatingly clearer just how wrong U.S. intelligence was in regard to Iraqi weapons and support for terrorism. The American teams of inspectors in the Iraq Survey Group, which has employed up to 1,400 people to scour the country and analyze the findings, have not been able to find a shred of evidence of anything other than dusty old plans and records of weapons apparently destroyed more than a decade ago. Countless examples of fruitless searches have been reported in the media. To cite one example: U.S. soldiers followed an intelligence report claiming that a complex built for Uday Hussein, Saddam’s son, hid a weapons warehouse with poison-gas storage tanks. “Well,” U.S. Army Major Ronald Hann Jr. told the Los Angeles Times, “the warehouse was a carport. It still had two cars inside. And the tanks had propane for the kitchen.”

Countless other errors and exaggerations have become evident. The thousands of aluminum tubes supposedly imported by Iraq for uranium enrichment were fairly conclusively found to be designed to build noncontroversial rockets. The long-range unmanned aerial vehicles, allegedly built to deliver bioweapons, were small, rickety, experimental planes with wood frames. The mobile bioweapon labs turned out to have had other, civilian purposes. And the granddaddy of all falsehoods, the charge that Iraq sought uranium in the West African country of Niger, was based on forged documents* — documents that the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies knew were fake nearly a year before President Bush highlighted the issue in his State of the Union address in January 2003.

“Either the system broke down,” former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to visit Niger and whose findings helped show that the documents were forged, told Mother Jones, “or there was selective use of bits of information to justify a decision to go to war that had already been taken.”

Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Instead, says Luttwak, the White House was groping for a rationale to satisfy the United Nations’ criteria for war. “Cheney was forced into this fake posture of worrying about weapons of mass destruction,” he says. “The ties to Al Qaeda? That’s complete nonsense.”

In the Senate, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is pressing for the Intelligence Committee to extend its investigation to look into the specific role of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, but there is strong Republican resistance to the idea.

In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation calling for a commission to investigate the intelligence mess and has collected more than a hundred Democrats* — but no Republicans* — in support of it. “I think they need to be looked at pretty carefully,” Waxman told Mother Jones when asked about the Office of Special Plans. “I’d like to know whether the political people pushed the intelligence people to slant their conclusions.”

Congressman Waxman, meet Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Government By Lying
By Wayne Brown
Jamaica Observer

February 8, 2004

‘Endgame for the president?’ was the title of a column by Robert Kuttner in last Wednesday’s Boston Globe. Pointing out that for more than a year now critics had been highlighting George W Bush’s ’systematic misrepresentations of everything from Iraq to education to budget numbers’, Kuttner suggested the US electorate might finally be waking up to the Bush administration’s strategy of government by lying.
It’s tempting to agree: in the past couple weeks the Bush cabal has seen its painstakingly spun web of fabrications tearing at several points.

The main point has been, of course, Iraq - ever since chief arms inspector David Kay testified before the US Congress that US intelligence was entirely wrong about Saddam’s alleged WMD, and that - surprise, surprise! - such weapons didn’t exist. A Bush loyalist, Kay tried to make the CIA the fall guy and exonerate the White House. But, declared Kuttner, that argument ‘didn’t fool those who watched last year as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld strong-armed the CIA, sifted through raw, unconfirmed reports, and massaged the data until he got the story he wanted… The real story here is the political manipulation of intelligence, and it isn’t going away.’ Other leading American newspapers and their columnists were equally adamant.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (’Get Me Rewrite!’, February 6) asserted scathingly that ‘right now America is going through an Orwellian moment… Do you remember when the CIA was reviled by hawks because its analysts were reluctant to present a sufficiently alarming picture of the Iraqi threat? Your memories are no longer operative. On or about last Saturday, history was revised: see, it’s the CIA’s fault that the threat was overstated. Given its warnings, the administration had no choice but to invade.’

Krugman is indignant, too, at the thought that more revisionism is surely in the works. ‘You may remember that Saddam gave in to UN demands that he allow inspectors to roam Iraq, looking for banned weapons. But your memories may soon be invalid. Recently Mr Bush said that war had been justified because Saddam ‘did not let us in’. And this claim was repeated by Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: ‘Why on earth didn’t [Saddam] let the inspectors in and avoid the war?’

In an editorial on Thursday entitled ‘Baghdad Is Bush’s Blue Dress’ (the reference is, of course, to Mr Clinton’s favourite groupie, Monica Lewinsky, and the famous semen stain), the Los Angeles Times accused the Bush administration of complicity in ‘arguably the greatest scandal in US history’ and raised the spectre of impeachment. The paper fumed that ‘The administration’s systematic’ - that word again! - ‘abuse of the facts, including the fraudulent link of Hussein to 9/11, has been obvious for two years. That’s why 23 former US intelligence experts - including several who quit in disgust - have been willing to speak out in Robert Greenwald’s shocking documentary Uncovered. The story they tell is one of an administration that went to war for reasons that smack of empire-building, then constructed a false reality to sell it to the American people. Is that not an impeachable offence?’ (Well, of course it is; and ‘war criminal’ might be added to the charge.) Lastly, in a major editorial (’The Administration’s Scramble,’ February 6) The New York Times concluded that the Bushies’ ‘increasingly desperate attempt’ to counter Kay’s report had failed.

‘The saddest spectacle,’ editorialised the Times inter alia, ‘was Mr Powell… on Monday, Mr Powell said he was not sure that he would have recommended an invasion had he known Iraq did not have stockpiles of banned weapons. The next day… he quickly retreated and said, ‘The president made the right decision.’ We have seen Mr Powell do this before. He does not make himself look better by dropping hints about his true feelings and then scurrying back to the loyal soldier’s position when scolded by the White House.’

Indeed, he does not. Had Mr Powell a year ago declined the role of chief lies-bearer to the UN for the Cheney-Bush White House’s impending attack on Iraq, had he had the courage to resign instead, the esteem in which he would have been held by pretty much the entire world would - as this column remarked at the time - have surpassed Muhammed Ali’s, surpassed even Mandela’s. Instead, he is today a nobody… a nothing… exactly as Belafonte predicted he would be by the time the Bushies were finished with him.

Sad is too mild a word. One would like to blame the hateful denizens of the Bush White House for the destruction of Colin Powell, but that would be inaccurate. Mr Powell has only himself to blame for the fact that - alas for the world! - he has turned out to be a coward. So, now, in an election year, Mr Bush has the drear task of having to try to neuter a whole range of investigations.

To begin with, he tried to resist an investigation into Iraq’s non-existent WMD, but felt the tide of public opinion turning against him and fell to trying to stage-manage one instead. Thus, Mr Bush’s hand-picked commission will be mandated, not to examine his administration’s possible corruption of the intelligence, but to investigate US ‘intelligence failures’ - and not specifically in Iraq but in general. And this commission will not be expected (nor indeed permitted?) to report until safely after the November elections. Even so: if the court of public opinion calls at least for the head of CIA director George Tenet, Mr Bush will doubtless be betting that Mr Tenet stays true to his Powell-esque record as a loyal, mea culpa-reciting fallguy for his boss’s venality. And Mr Tenet may not.

The members of a second investigation - of the administration’s vicious ‘outing’ of CIA official Valerie Plame in revenge for her ex-diplomat husband breaking silence over the likely non-existence of Iraqi WMD in the run-up to the planned attack on Iraq - will just have to be trusted by the Bushies to come up professing eternal bewilderment over the identity of the culprit. And indeed, one takes John Ashcroft’s recusing of himself from the matter as a sign of White House confidence that it owns the commissioners in that one.

The president has tried to block the extension (by two months) of a third investigation - one into possible security lapses by his Administration in the months leading up to 9/11. But there, too, Mr Bush has had to give ground; and that report, the likeliest of the three to be more than a mere whitewash, will be out in time for its findings to be a factor in the coming elections.

In the meantime, however, Mr Bush has presented a budget which, according to columnist Bob Herbert (’Tuning Out the GOP’s Siren Song’, NYT February 6), is ’so irresponsible and deceitful it has rattled public officials and ordinary voters on the right and the left’.

Mr Bush’s budget, says Herbert, ‘would jack up military spending by seven per cent, to $26.5 billion. But that figure does not include the money needed to cover the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ll get those numbers later. After the election. What the budget does include are additional tax breaks for the wealthy, along with proposals that would deal potentially crippling blows to government support for education, environmental protection, veterans’ programmes, low-income housing, child care and the like. What seems to be unsettling to large numbers of voters (not just hard-core anti-Bush Democrats) is the notion that events are slipping - or have slipped - out of control, that there is no endgame in Iraq, no plan to rein in runaway deficits, no strategy to put Americans back to work, and no limit to the Bush Administration’s willingness to shower its friends with favours and public dollars’.

The upshot of all this - and perhaps also of the intense media coverage of the Democratic primaries and caucuses, with their attacks on the Bush White House - is that the president has slipped sharply in the polls, especially among that portion of the electorate you’d expect to be soberer and/or more attentive than the average: older folk, independents and Midwesterners. An AP poll conducted last week found, for the first time, more voters vowing ‘definitely’ to vote against Bush (43 per cent) than for him (37 per cent). And Bush’s approval rating was languishing at 47 per cent, down nine points in a month.

Indeed, it was the same approval rating as Bush’s father’s at this point, 12 years ago - and 10 months before he lost the presidency to Clinton. And that panicky situation for the Bushies is having some very weird consequences. For example.

Those only casually following the current excitement over the proliferation of WMD may be at a loss to understand why the US appears to be tamely accepting the silly little soap opera which took place last week in Pakistan, where the country’s revered ‘father of the Pakistan nuclear bomb’ tearfully took the fall for Pakistan’s exporting of nuclear material and know-how to various ‘rogue states’, and then was equally tearfully pardoned by President Musharraf.

The explanation is that Messrs Bush, Wolfowitz, Rove, etc, nostalgic for the sudden spike in the president’s popularity which attended the capture of Saddam Hussein, are hoping niftily to net, in time for November, a much bigger fish. And so, over there in Afghanistan, poor American boys in uniform are being prepared for a huge spring offensive along the Afghan border in the hope of - gasp! - catching Bin Laden.

And who knows, as an elections gimmick it just might work. You and I know Bin Laden’s capture will have as little effect on the Islamic resistance as the capture of Saddam has had on the Iraqi resistance. But mainstream Americans are simple folk, and would doubtless revel in the notion that Mr Bush was decisively winning the war on terror - the same ‘terror’ that Mr Bush is in fact inciting, with his crass grab at other countries’ resources - and here’s the point.

If Musharraf’s government were now to be tarred with the nuclear-proliferator’s brush, the US would be forced by its own laws to impose sanctions on Pakistan. And how would it then get Bin Laden out of his hole - and Mr Bush and his cronies (for so the cynical thinking clearly goes) another term with their hands in the till.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Tenet Exposes Bush’s Misleading On WMD
The Daily Mis-Lead
February 5th, 2004

In a stunning blow to the president’s credibility, CIA Director George Tenet said this morning that intelligence “analysts never said there was an imminent threat” from Iraq before the war. His comments are consistent with various warnings sent to the White House from the intelligence community that specifically told the president his claims that Iraq definitely had chemical/biological and nuclear weapons were unsubstantiated. Tenet’s comments call into question whether the Bush Administration was knowingly ignoring intelligence and misleading the country by claiming definitively that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was therefore an “imminent,” “immediate,” “urgent” and “mortal” threat to the American people.
Though the White House has claimed it never said Iraq was an imminent threat, the record proves otherwise. When White House communications director Dan Bartlett was asked before the war whether Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat, he responded, “Of course he is.” When White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked why NATO (and thus the United States) should support Turkey’s request for defensive troops, he responded, “This is about an imminent threat.” When White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was asked whether the invasion of Iraq was because Iraq was an imminent threat, he responded, “Absolutely.”

The president also used other language aimed at misleading Americans into thinking that U.S. intelligence definitively knew Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that threatened America - even though the intelligence community told the president it had no such evidence. The president said before the war that Iraq was an “urgent threat” and a “grave threat” to “any American.” In his speech informing Americans that the invasion had started, the President said Iraq “threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.”

These comments were echoed by other top Administration officials. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on September 19, 2002 that “no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.” And Vice President Cheney called Iraq a “mortal threat,” and said “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction…to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” And Secretary of State Colin Powell, in pressing for U.N. support, said definitively that Iraq possessed “deadly weapons programs” that “are real and present dangers to the region and to the world.”

Sources:
Speech of CIA Director George Tenet, Sun Herald, 2/5/2004
The DIA on Iraq’s Chemical Weapons Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 6/13/2003
White House: CIA questioned State of the Union address, Miami Herald, 7/23/2003
Administration minces words on Iraq, AFP, 1/31/2004
Showdown: Iraq — The Weapons Report, CNN, 01/26/2003
Press Gaggle by Scott McClellan, 2/10/2003
Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer, 5/7/2003
President Recaps Historic Week in Domestic and Foreign Affairs, 11/23/2002
President Bush Addresses the Nation, 3/19/2003
Still no mass weapons, no ties to 9/11, no truth, Boston Globe, 12/17/2003
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council, 2/5/2003

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

The Honorable Dennis Hastert
Speaker, U.S. House of Representatives
H-232
U.S. Capitol

January 23, 2004

Dear Mr. Speaker:

We, the undersigned former intelligence officials in the U.S. intelligence community, request that you launch an immediate, bipartisan congressional investigation into who leaked the name of Valerie Plame, wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and other members of the media that exposed her status as an undercover CIA officer. The disclosure of Ms. Plame’s name was an unprecedented and shameful event in American history and, in our professional judgment, has damaged U.S. national security, specifically the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence gathering using human sources. Any breach of the code of confidentiality and cover weakens the overall fabric of intelligence, and, directly or indirectly, jeopardizes the work and safety of intelligence workers and their sources.
While we are pleased that the U.S. Department of Justice is conducting an investigation and that the U.S. Attorney General has recused himself, we believe that the Congress must send an unambiguous message that the intelligence officers tasked with collecting or analyzing intelligence must never be turned into political punching bags. We believe it is important that Congress speak with one voice on this issue. Moreover, the investigation must focus on more than simply identifying who leaked this information. We believe it is important for Congress to help the American people understand how this happened and take a clear stand that such behavior will not be tolerated under any administration, Republican or Democrat. A thorough and successful congressional investigation of this crime is necessary to send a clear signal that the elected representatives of this government will not accept nor ignore the political exploitation of the men and women in our intelligence community. A professional, thorough investigation will also help boost the weakened morale of our intelligence personnel and renew their confidence and trust in the elected leadership of the country.

Our friends and colleagues have difficult jobs gathering the intelligence which helps, for example, to prevent terrorist attacks against Americans at home and abroad. They sometimes face great personal risk and must spend long hours away from family and friends. They serve because they love this country and are committed to defending the principles of liberty and freedom. They do not expect public acknowledgement for their work, but they do expect and deserve their government’s protection.

For the good of our country, we ask you to please stand up for every man and woman who works for the U.S. intelligence community by immediately launching a congressional investigation.

Sincerely yours,
Larry C. Johnson, former Analyst

Joined by:
James Marcinkowski, former Case Officer
Michael Grimaldi, former Analyst
Brent Cavan, former Analyst
Dr. Marc Sageman, MD, Ph.D., former Case Officer
James A. Smith, former Case Officer
John McCavitt, former Case Officer
Ray McGovern, former Analyst
Ray Close, former Analyst
William Wagner, former Case Officer

cc:
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
U.S. Rep. Porter Goss, Chairman, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, Ranking Member, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

US Spies Were Ignored, or Worse, If They Failed To Make The Case For War
Sidney Blumenthal
The Guardian

February 5, 2004

Before he departed on his quest for Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction last June, David Kay, chief of the Iraq Survey Group, told friends that he expected promptly to locate the cause of the pre-emptive war. On January 28, Kay appeared before the Senate to testify that there were no WMDs. “It turns out that we were all wrong,” he said. President Bush, he added helpfully, was misinformed by the whole intelligence community which, like Kay, made assumptions that turned out to be false. Within days, Bush declared that he would, after all, appoint a commission to investigate; significantly, it would report its findings only after the presidential election.
Kay’s testimony was the catalyst for this u-turn, but only one of his claims is correct: that he was wrong. The truth is that much of the intelligence community did not fail, but presented correct assessments and warnings, that were overridden and suppressed. On virtually every single important claim made by the Bush administration in its case for war, there was serious dissension. Discordant views - not from individual analysts but from several intelligence agencies as a whole - were kept from the public as momentum was built for a congressional vote on the war resolution.

Precisely because of the qualms the administration encountered, it created a rogue intelligence operation, the Office of Special Plans, located within the Pentagon and under the control of neo-conservatives. The OSP roamed outside the ordinary inter-agency process, stamping its approval on stories from Iraqi exiles that the other agencies dismissed as lacking credibility, and feeding them to the president.

At the same time, constant pressure was applied to the intelligence agencies to force their compliance. In one case, a senior intelligence officer who refused to buckle under was removed.

Bruce Hardcastle was a senior officer for the Middle East for the Defence Intelligence Agency. When Bush insisted that Saddam was actively and urgently engaged in a nuclear weapons programme and had renewed production of chemical weapons, the DIA reported otherwise. According to Patrick Lang, the former head of human intelligence at the CIA, Hardcastle “told [the Bush administration] that the way they were handling evidence was wrong.” The response was not simply to remove Hardcastle from his post: “They did away with his job,” Lang says. “They wanted only liaison officers … not a senior intelligence person who argued with them.”

When the state department’s bureau of intelligence and research (INR) submitted reports which did not support the administration’s case - saying, for example, that the aluminum tubes Saddam possessed were for conventional rocketry, not nuclear weapons (a report corroborated by department of energy analysts), or that mobile laboratories were not for WMDs, or that the story about Saddam seeking uranium in Niger was bogus, or that there was no link between Saddam and al-Qaida (a report backed by the CIA) - its analyses were shunted aside. Greg Thielman, chief of the INR at the time, told me: “Everyone in the intelligence community knew that the White House couldn’t care less about any information suggesting that there were no WMDs or that the UN inspectors were very effective.”

When the CIA debunked the tales about Niger uranium and the Saddam/al-Qaida connection, its reports were ignored and direct pressure applied. In October 2002, the White House inserted mention of the uranium into a speech Bush was to deliver, but the CIA objected and it was excised. Three months later, it reappeared in his state of the union address. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed never to have seen the original CIA memo and deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley said he had forgotten about it.

Never before had any senior White House official physically intruded into CIA’s Langley headquarters to argue with mid-level managers and analysts about unfinished work. But twice vice president Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff, came to offer their opinions. According to Patrick Lang: “They looked disapproving, questioned the reports and left an impression of what you’re supposed to do. They would say: ‘you haven’t looked at the evidence’. The answer would be, those reports [from Iraqi exiles] aren’t valid. The analysts would be told, you should look at this again’. Finally, people gave up. You learn not to contradict them.”

The CIA had visitors too, according to Ray McGovern, former CIA chief for the Middle East. Newt Gingrich came, and Condi Rice, and as for Cheney, “he likes the soup in the CIA cafeteria,” McGovern jokes.

Meanwhile, senior intelligence officers were kept in the dark about the OSP. “I didn’t know about its existence,” said Thielman. “They were cherry picking intelligence and packaging it for Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to take to the president. That’s the kind of rogue operation that peer review is intended to prevent.”

CIA director George Tenet, for his part, opted to become a political advocate for Bush’s brief rather than a protector of the intelligence community. On the eve of the congressional debate, in a crammed three-week period, the agency wrote a 90-page national intelligence estimate justifying the administration’s position on WMDs and scrubbed of all dissent. Once the document was declassifed after the war it became known that it contained 40 caveats - including 15 uses of “probably”, all of which had been removed from the previously published version. Tenet further ingratiated himself by remaining silent about the OSP. “That’s totally unacceptable for a CIA director,” said Thielman.

On February 5 2003, Colin Powell presented evidence of WMDs before the UN. Cheney and Libby had tried to inject material from Iraqi exiles and the OSP into his presentation, but Powell rejected most of it. Yet, for the most important speech of his career, he refused to allow the presence of any analysts from his own intelligence agency. “He didn’t have anyone from INR near him,” said Thielman. “Powell wanted to sell a rotten fish. He had decided there was no way to avoid war. His job was to go to war with as much legitimacy as we could scrape up.”

Powell ignored INR analysts’ comments on his speech. Almost every piece of evidence he unveiled turned out later to be false.

This week, when Bush announced he would appoint an investigative commission, Powell offered a limited mea culpa at a meeting at the Washington Post. He said that if only he had known the intelligence, he might not have supported an invasion. Thus he began to show carefully calibrated remorse, to distance himself from other members of the administration and especially Cheney. Powell also defended his UN speech, claiming “it reflected the best judgments of all of the intelligence agencies”.

Powell is sensitive to the slightest political winds, especially if they might affect his reputation. If he is a bellwether, will it soon be that every man must save himself?

Sidney_Blumenthal@yahoo.com

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Bush Changes His WMD Claims
The Daily Mis-Lead
January 2004

Ignoring his previous definitive statements, President Bush this week sought to change the justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Before the war, the president said there was “no doubt the Iraqi regime continues to possess the most lethal weapons ever devised,” while Vice President Cheney said, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction…to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”
This week, however, in the absence of any evidence of weapons of mass destruction, Bush said the war was justified not because Iraq had WMD, but because Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.” When asked last month about the shift from asserting Iraq “possessed” WMD, to Iraq merely exploring “WMD-related-program-activities,” Bush replied, “What’s the difference?”

Both President Bush and Vice President Cheney made their definitive pre-war statements repeatedly, using specific language. On chemical weapons, Bush said before the war, “the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas” - a claim since debunked by Bush’s own chief weapons inspector, David Kay, who said, “Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled chemical weapons program after 1991.”

On biological weapons, Bush said before the war that “Iraq has at least seven mobile factories for the production of biological agents - equipment mounted on trucks and rails to evade discovery.” However, Mr. Kay reported, “We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile biological weapons production effort.” The president also claimed that “Iraq has a growing fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas.” But the Washington Post later reported that the vehicles Bush cited “were never meant to spread toxins” - a fact the U.S. Air Force intelligence service had shared with the administration.

On nuclear weapons, Bush said before the war that “Iraq could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.” More famously, in last year’s State of the Union, the president said Iraq “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” and told Americans to fear “a mushroom cloud.” Similarly, Vice President Cheney said “Saddam has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” But Mr. Kay reported in August, “We have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material.”

Sources:
Presidential Address, 3/17/2003
“Still no mass weapons, no ties to 9/11, no truth, Boston Globe, 12/17/2003
State of the Union Address, 01/20/2004
Interview With President Bush, ABC News, 12/16/2003
Presidential Remarks, 10/07/2002
Statement by David Kay, 10/02/2003
President’s Radio Address, 2/08/2003
Statement by David Kay, 10/02/2003
“Air Force analysts feel vindicated over drones”, The Olympian, 09/27/2003
Presidential Remarks, 10/07/2002
Presidential Remarks, 10/07/2002
“Ten Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq”, Alternet, 06/27/2003
Statement by David Kay, 10/02/2003
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)